Posted
by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday October 20, 2010 @12:15PM
from the bright-and-shiny dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Google on Tuesday released a new stable version of its internet browser, Chrome 7. The latest update is part of Google's promise in July to release a new stable version of Chrome about every six weeks. Chrome 7 comes with hundreds of bug fixes, an updated HTML5 parser, the File API, and directory upload via input tag. It is available in the stable and beta channels for Windows, Mac, and Linux. 'The main focus was the hundreds of bug fixes,' Jeff Chang, a Google product manager, wrote in a blog post."

Yes and the way most people learn keyboard shortcuts is... by first seeing them in the application menu. Putting back the http:// protocol prefix and trailing slash on root directory index would be a good idea too.

Well they were doing 0.1 and 0.2, but then they jumped to 1.0. I think the prevailing theory at the time was that computer manufacturers didn't want to ship "beta" software, so Google simply removed the beta logo and bumped the version number. Problem solved!:)

Is the placebo effect real? Yes, if you don't care how you achieve results. They'd call it Chrome Deluxe 2010 Ultra Extreme if that'd bring more users. Unlike many open source projects that are anti-marketing, not just neutral to it but actually opposed to using more "marketable" names.

Is Chrome considered "open source" like firefox, or "closed" like Opera?

"Chromium" is like the "Darwin kernel" (MacOS X), which is open source, where Apple contributes and receives contributions, while creating their own environment on top (the rest of the OS) that is closed source.

"Google Chrome Browser" is a modified and closed adaptation of Chromium that adds google's branding and datamining-ware --I think it also added that Mozilla-dreaded H.264 decoder or some other licensed software that can't be open sourced.

The base for Chrome, chromium, is open source. I'm not sure how much, if any, code is proprietary in the Google Chrome binaries, but from using builds based on the open-source code there does not seem to be much difference. Opera, AFIAK, is mostly, if not completely, closed-source. Firefox is open-source, but Mozilla has strict rules on branding of builds not compiled by them (the reason for "IceWeasel" in Debian).

The difference between Microsoft calling NT 6.1 "seven" is that it is pure marketing. The vers

Windows marketing has nothing to do with its success. Look at the prevalence of Vista during the huge backlash of "GET THIS FUCKING SHIT OFF MY COMPUTER" "Sorry we can't, you don't have a license." This was a key factor in the rise of MacOSX use.

I said this before and I will say this again. Google, just like MS, is playing the version game so they make an immature browser seem equal to other browser, at least to the unsophisticated portion of the customer base.

This is not to say that Google is not catching up fast, just that they are focusing on version numbers in their add copies, while primarily fixing bugs in actuality.

Compare this to firms that are actually trying to deliver a useful feature set to customers, rather than just focusing on metrics that have long been shown to be meaningless. Firefox is happy at 3.6 Safari is happy at 5. Opera, which may have been around longer than google itself, is only at 10.63. These are people who deliver useful browser.

I said this before and I will say this again. Google, just like MS, is playing the version game so they make an immature browser seem equal to other browser, at least to the unsophisticated portion of the customer base.

How is Chrome immature?

Google's explanation is that shorter development cycles mean that they won't have to wait as long if some new feature missed the feature freeze.

Why isn't it 6.x? Does this mean in 6 weeks they'll give us 8.0? Whatever happened to using the numbers AFTER the decimal point, especially for releases that concentrate mostly on bug-fixes?

Did you ever wonder at how arbitrary such numbering schemes are? To the end user, a new version is a new version. They either have to download an update or they don't. (Mac or Ubuntu take the version numbering to extremes by giving new versions get fancy animal names. Not a bad idea, really...)

What's the point of all these frequent releases? Maybe I ought to give this browser a try... but Firefox and seaMonkey have served me well since I quit Mozilla Netscape, so I'm inclined not to change. ("If it ain't broke...")

The reason for the frequent releases is that instead of x.1 or x.2 releases for major features, they do a whole new version number. Most projects will use such increments for minor additions and whole integers for rewrites or major overhauls. Its the other end of the spectrum from projects that have an integer release only once every decade and have version numbers extending in multiple decimals, like x.yy.zz.a.b.cccc and other inanely specific versions.

My theory is that they are trying to scare the bejesus out of Microsoft and even Mozilla into doing more frequent releases themselves. The main thing holding back Google's entire strategy is that browsers aren't good enough yet. They want to take over the whole business market by moving it into the cloud using Google Apps. But they can't because browsers suck. So they make Chrome - a browser that doesn't suck. It's been helpful but what they really need is to influence the other browsers, and on

Artificially dividing feature releases into major and minor feature releases makes sense only if you have preplanned major and minor releases. Chrome does not. Chrome has a regular release schedule. The features that are ready for stable release at the time for the stable release go into the release. All of these get a major version number. You don't have a long process building to a 3.7 release that gets renumbered 4.0. You get a short cycle between stable fea

And for the Chrome-heads who point out AdBlock [google.com], it is a good start but still nowhere near as effective. It lets many ads through, it still downloads and just hides a large chunk of ads, and it does not seem to stop flash ads at all.

Privoxy is far inferior: it's slower, it requires more setup, it's not as aware of all the different ads out there, being without adblock-like update channels, and it's not as interactive, being separate from the GUI.

Yet it still doesn't have an equivalent to AdBlock Plus.
And for the Chrome-heads who point out AdBlock [google.com], it is a good start but still nowhere near as effective. It lets many ads through, it still downloads and just hides a large chunk of ads, and it does not seem to stop flash ads at all.

I acknowledge that the Chrome plug-in has limitations by itself, but I personally find it much more than adequate because I also took a couple of minutes to write a cron script to to download and apply the latest hosts file [mvps.org]. I never see ads; I can't remember the last time I saw a Flash ad, and my bandwidth isn't wasted on ads (or worse).

The Chrome plug-in is only good enough for grandma and average users, but the rest of us have a multi-layered strategy anyway. Firefox is a great browser, but I liked i

The biggest problem that Chrome has is that there's no way (that I am aware of) to turn off the auto-updates. personally, it doesn't bother me that much, but I can understand if it does bother someone else. There should at least be the option to ask (which again there may be, but I couldn't find it).

Really, can someone convince me that asking for this feature is asking too much after all these Chrome iterations? What's really wrong with this feature that makes it unappealing to implement? Come on Google!

How about giving users 'what they want?' Those who see no need for this can disable its presence in the menu. Again, I may want to print stuff on my own terms...not on what folks like you as me to do i.e.

"...save the html and open it into a program made for printing like Word."

Chrome is okay, but I hate the minimal control you have over things like cookies. It's either all or none with Chrome. Then you have the lack of a sidebar for bookmarks and the bookmark interface itself is very unintuitive at best. There are other gripes as well, but those can mostly be solved with using various extensions.

Interesting, Debian has chromium-browser (the brand-stripped chrome that lacks some of the phone-home features) in its experimental repository as 7.0.544.0~r61416-1 [debian.org] while Google's apt repository is featuring 7.0.517.41-r62167 as both beta and stable (unstable has moved to 8.0.552.5-r62886). Unless I'm mistaken, those version numbers are composed of [version]~[VCS revision]-[package version] and chromium-browser's versions are pinned to their equivalent google-chrome version. That makes the current version

I found what the issue was. The website has, on the Terms of Service page, a checkbox for "Make Chrome my default browser". This is checked by default. Like most users I just clicked "accept" on the TOS to move on and didn't notice that.

Does anyone else have a problem with the ugly fonts in Chromium in ever since Ubuntu Lucid came out? It was the same in recent Chromes, which is why I have the version pinned to 5.0.342.7-r42476 .

The problem is that recent Chromiums seem to not use the specified font (DejaVu sans or serif), and instead have a really thin, unreadable font which you have to Ctrl++ many times to be readable, which then widens the web page beyond the browser width.

Where is the MathML (the official W3C mark-up language for mathematics) support?

Firefox has rendered MathML quite well for years now. Google's explanation was that "we will support MathML when webkit does". This was an annoying response, since a $200 billion dollar corporation with 20,000 geniuses as employees could certainly contribute the resources to webkit to add MathML in short order. But now webkit has got MathML implemented! And we have a new release of Chrome! So where is the MathML?

It would nice if it improves Youtube playback. It worked at some point, but then after some mandatory sneaky update it broke. For those of you that haven't experienced Youtube breakage: you get a completely incorrect error message and no video. Not only on the main site, but also the 90% of internet video that is just an embedded Youtube player. It can't be diagnosed or fixed and there are thousands of complaints out there on forums about the problem. If you randomly hit then there is no fix.

Then that started working again (was it with 5.0 or 6.0, I forget). But now anything above 480p stutters like crazy. It is a real shame because Chrome is a nice browser, but if they can't even maintain compatibility with one of the largest sites on the web (which they own FFS) then they have issues. Every other browser on my machine can play the same video though the same drivers without a problem.

At this point I might go back to the bloated piece of crap that Firefox has become on the mac....

At this point I might go back to the bloated piece of crap that Firefox has become on the mac....

The first thing I downloaded after buying my Acer Win 7 netbook was firefox, and I'm a bit disappointed in it since I wiped Windows. I tell the Linux Firefox to work offline, but the next time I open it it's back online trying to reload pages it already loaded. Its Windows counterpart doesn't do this.

I assume it probably has something to do with a difference of OS settings? I know private browsing turns itself off when restarting the browser - by design so maybe the Linux version is also coded to reset the offline status on reload (or not retain it on shutdown.)

And THIS is the kind of cancer that turns many off of FOSS right here. A user says they have a problem, and what happens? I don't trust you, you're a liar, you're a shill, etc. Why not instead ask USEFUL questions, instead of thinking everyone is out to get you? I would ask: What kind of system, what hardware, what OS, can you post screencaps or a video showing what is going wrong? If you don't know how to do that, ask us and we'll tell you how.

You see THAT is how you try to get down to what is causing a problem, basic troubleshooting 101. Why FOSS users want to be paranoid instead of helpful I don't know, but I just don't see that behavior on proprietary apps. With those if you say "I have a problem" one generally assumes if the post isn't "Your product suxorz!" that they are generally having a problem. Just because YOU don't have a problem doesn't mean it doesn't exist, so why not try to help the guy out? It could be a conflicting program, hell it could be the program prefers one CPU over another (with Intel rigging their compiler this is a possibility) or a combination of factors. Let us try to be helpful instead of paranoid, okay?

Exactly. It is this "our product is ALWAYS the bestest!" crap that I'm sure turns many off of FOSS apps. I work on PCs every single day and I've found that an app that works beautifully in one setup may be total shit on another. Does that make the app shit and is a reason for blind defense of it? No, of course not. There are only so many hours in a day and OSes and apps are extremely complex chunks of code now. A MUCH better attitue would be to simply ask a couple of questions and help the guy out. Not only does that build general good will but it is simply nice to help out a fellow human being. I've seen first hand how frustrating having a problem can be when you don't know how to solve it, and assholes calling people shill and insulting them helps NO one.

Notice how he called me names for daring to politely point out that bad attitude doesn't help FOSS? This kind of rampant foaming at the mouth fanboi crap helps NO ONE. it doesn't help promote the app or its adoption, because any user that has a problem will be turned off and drop it. And it certainly doesn't help the one who first told his problem, who has been insulted, nor the insulter, who is quickly coming off as a horse's ass and more than a little paranoid.

As for the "file a bug report" suggestion by the rude poster? How exactly does that help him using the product now. I've seen outstanding bugs in both FOSS and proprietary apps stay unfixed for years. And who says it is a bug and not a conflict? How does the user tell, especially if he/she isn't familar with the software and its possible quirks? I say when you have tech guys like us, who have been in the trenches and done this sort of the thing before, the best thing you can do to further adoption of a piece of FOSS software is to try to be polite and helpful if you can.

As I seem to be the only token Windows guy around here, I'll be happy to ask questions from the Windows view and he is welcome to write here or email me and I'll be happy to try to help. Are there errors in Event Viewer? When the stuttering occurs are you able to launch other apps? If so, can you launch task manager and tell what the CPU usage is? What are the specs of the hardware? which version of Windows? All these things would help to quickly narrow down the source of the error, and I'm not even a Chrome guy. I just think a little civility and decency is something many have seem to forgotten here, especially with regards to software that attracts fanbois. Notice you never see that with boring software? It is never "Quickbooks rock! Eat shit Quicken lover!" or any of that crap. Its just tools folks, not ballclubs. Paranoia and fanboi attacks help nobody.

Just how the hell did such a bug infected version get released to begin with?

A test suite that guarantees 100% coverage is called formal verification [wikipedia.org]. As I understand it, this is far too labor-intensive for commercial off-the-shelf PC software. So there's a trade-off: you can write a bigger test suite, not ship a product, and bring in no revenue; or you can fix defects and add them to the test suite as they are discovered. For decades, the latter has been sufficient for PC software used by the general public.

No, but that doesn't mean you talk about it. At a previous job one of the lead developers was responsible for writing the release notes. At one version, he bragged in there about how "over 200 bugs" had been fixed in that release. Not long after letting it out the door, we started getting a barrage of emails from angry customers demanding to know "why your software has hundreds of bugs in it."

The reality is that software has bugs. The reality is also that most users will never be impacted by all of them. Touting the number of bug fixes as if it's some kind of badge of honor just confuses people and makes them panic.

Maybe that's because you didn't specify how the method's being called, or offer suggestions as to how it's supposed to behave. Is it actually a bug in Chrome's implementation of Javascript? Maybe the TeamSite app has some broken browser detection.

Can you supply a unit test that only fails on Chrome? It might be a coincidence (or just copied unspecified behavior) that the other browsers work.

Without more information, it's not clear at all if there's even a bug, let alone where it might be. There are more pre

Try "chrome://flags [chrome], if your running the Dev build (or Canary, the daily) on certain OSs then side tabs is an experimental option. I know it is available on the Windows version, and am pretty sure it is there on the Linux versions now.